Calista (by Maria Thomas)
Calista was tired. And cold. And aware of the fact that people thought
of her a cliché. And dammit being a self-aware cliché really cut like
a knife, twisted that knife in the wound, rubbed salt in that wound
and then added cold deliberate insult to that injury. Being a cliché
she knew her way around them and how to sequence them perfectly- she
knew the order in which their pain must be felt. She knew this
because, oh crap watch another one, fungus-ridden, come-unbidden,
creep into the text... she'd been there done that. She'd fallen prey
to the way of the cliché by having inhabited its lonely scorned-at
world for too long to be able to return to her waking life. But what
the others didn't know was the long and soul-bruising rite of passage
you needed to endure before you became a casualty of cliché. It was no
bed of roses, no walk in the park, no goddam turkey shoot. It was a
long, painful process with a cruel unexpected ending.
For starters, you had to feel things. And not just feel them, but feel
them below bone and sinew. Feel them from the deepest place that
existed in you. She remembered the first time this had happened with
her. She was saying goodbye to someone special- it doesn't matter who
it was. What matters was that the train was pulling away, tortuously
slowly, and in her dramatic mind with the immutable finality of a
Forever. And it did not feel good. In fact, she felt
sick. Doubled-over-in-pain sick. If I can describe this I'll feel
better she thought. And her pain-blurred consciousness clumsily formed
the thick-tongued words... my innards feel gnarled... and
twisted... wrung out... squeezed dry...my stomach... oh my god
my gut... god it's like someone... I have it... I know how this
feels... this is just gut-wrenching. And she was flushed and
embarrassed. Almost ashamed. Ashamed that the one word she could come
up with to describe what was arguably the most genuine and
deeply-experienced emotion she had felt to date, should be the
preferred adjective of choice of a million trashy novelists and a
million trashy movie-reviewers. Gut-wrenching? That's what I came up
with?
And then that other time, she was looking for the words to capture and
communicate the happy DizzyFizzy, the SuchMuchness of her HereNow, and
the beauty of the hebeginswhereiendwhereheendswhereibeginwherehebegins
and that means that I-don't-know-where-I-am-anymore-but-I-like-it-here
and the words that she spoke were not those that she willed. Get
this. She said "I love you". The ultimate cliché. The stuff of a
gazillion hallmark cards. And that's when the last nail in her coffin
of cliché was driven through her largely misunderstood heart. And she
bled with the realization that whenever she connected with anything
true, she had to use words handed down to her by generations of
faceless others. She burned with the knowledge that the experiences
that she felt most fiercely possessive of, had to be transmuted into
the most generic language, stripped of fire and meaning by years of
abuse. And she knew she'd never be able to explain any of this to
Jo. She fell asleep, and in her subconscious mind played the
recurring-dream-cliché of Calista carrying her unrequited-love-cliché
to the grave.
Jo and Calista
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